Category: Blog

No More Free Paper Score Reports from TOEFL

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

According to the TOEFL Naver blog, in January ETS will end the practice of sending paper score reports to test takers at no charge.  Currently, score reports are mailed to all test takers at no extra cost when the request is made at the point of registration, with express shipping available for an additional fee.  Come January, only express shipping will be available.

Based on the current fee schedule, that means test takers who need a score report will be asked to pay an additional $25 at the point of registration, or $60 if one is requested after the test.

Social media posts suggest that there is still quite a lot of demand for paper score reports.  They also suggest that standard (free) delivery is unreliable in a lot of places.  And that most test takers are unaware that those usually come in through their national postal service.

Some test takers will be unhappy about paying more (per recent price hikes) and getting less.  On the other hand, there will be fewer cranky test takers complaining about not getting their score reports.

If memory serves, IELTS Official still provides paper score reports in many markets, but has begun phasing them out in certain instances.  For example, the British Council no longer provides them to people who take the computer-delivered IELTS in Korea. Pearson and Duolingo, meanwhile, do not provide paper score reports at all.

Following this change, LANGUAGECERT may be the only firm that still provides a paper score report to all test takers at no extra cost.

 

Lots and Lots of TOEFL Prep

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

I noticed a moment ago that the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is now a reseller of Study.com’s TOEFL prep course.  Test takers can now purchase the course for $199 (3-months access) or $349 (6-months access) right from the ETS website.  Payment is made to ETS who, I presume, remits a few bucks back to Study.com.  This is a separate product from the Official TOEFL Prep Course ($149.99) developed by ETS in house.  And it should not be confused with the “smart” ($307) and “genius” ($519) bundles of test prep that test takers are prompted to purchase after selecting a test date.  And, needless to say, it isn’t the same as the $1500 official TOEFL AI course sold exclusively in China.  Or the $39 AI app sold to the rest of the world.

This is quite a menu. And I haven’t even mentioned half of it here.

One senses that my friends at ETS still aren’t fully aware of why the Duolingo English Test is eating their lunch.  Which is perplexing because the TOEFL product line is being turned on its head in what appears to be a direct response to said lunch consumption.

I think most people realize now that Duolingo’s success is partially attributable to their decision to forgo the sale of test prep products.  At no point in the process of booking the DET does one of their weird cartoon characters hawk a costly course or graded practice test.  At no point is it suggested to test takers that paid prep will even make a difference.  What materials Duolingo have created are given away for free. People like that. They like that a lot.  It creates a much more pleasurable and respectful experience than one where a test maker is ceaselessly pitching paid products which are purported to increase scores.  This, as much as its famously low cost and controversial “perceived easiness,” is what has made the DET such a success in recent years.

I get that sales of prep products will increase the TOEFL program’s bottom line.  But only in the short term.  If ETS wants to turn this ship around for the long haul this isn’t the way to go.  They should be scaling this stuff back instead of ramping it up. Most of this stuff should be free.  That much ought to be obvious to everyone.

Incidentally, FairTest’s Akil Bello touched on a similar case a few weeks ago, suggesting that ACT’s move to resell ACT prep courses  conflict of interest concerns.  

British Council Selling “Everything”

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

It seems that the British Council isn’t making much progress in its quest to get the £197mn it owes to the FCDO written off.  In the meantime, they are making cuts and selling assets.  Speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee a few days ago, CEO Scott McDonald said:

“…we are now selling everything the British Council has that we are able to sell. I talked about estates last time; we have 42 properties around the world and we are selling, or attempting to sell, every single one that is possible to sell. We are selling that bit of the art collection that we are able to sell under the terms of the museum code. We sold the school we had in Madrid. We do not have anything else.”

That school in Madrid, by the way, was sold for £50 million.  It had been operated by the British Council since the 1940s. But even accessing the proceeds of the sale is proving to be tricky.

Test watchers might be asking if McDonald really is in the process of selling “everything” that can be sold.  Given that the British Council’s IELTS operations in India were sold to IDP Education for £130 million just a few years ago, some might be wondering if we might see the rest of their IELTS business on the auction block in the near future.

The answer is: probably not.

Per the current agreement between all three IELTS partners (Cambridge, BC and IDP) the partners can only sell or transfer their share to one of the other founding partners.  The British Council couldn’t, for instance, sell its IELTS business to a deep-pocketed competitor like Pearson or PeopleCert.

Meanwhile, IDP Education Ltd  isn’t in a position to acquire expensive assets right now, especially one that might come with a price tag that exceeds its current market cap.  And Cambridge, it is safe to assume, is content to continue developing the test while collecting a lucrative per-test fee from administrations carried out by the other partners.

Stand and Deliver Filmplakatkarten

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

I added this swell filmplakatkarten for “Stand and Deliver” to my collection of standardized testing ephemera.  I paid a dollar for it on eBay, and the seller threw in a card for an unrelated Willem Dafoe movie from the 1980s.  Regular readers already know that Willem Dafoe is a national treasure, so that’s pretty cool.

Also pictured is my copy of Jay Mathews’ book about Escalante.  If you are a fan of the movie and haven’t read the book, it is worth seeking out.  If it was a little easier to find in 2025, I would make it the next selection of the “Almost-a-Real-Thing Standardized Testing Book Club.”

 

 

GMAT Volumes Way Down

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

GMAC has published statistics for the 2025 testing year.  They note that the GMAT was taken 93,196 times in the year.  That’s down from 115,286 in 2024.  In the last pre-pandemic year, the test was taken 225,621 times. According to the numbers I have in front of me, the all-time high was 286,529 tests in 2012.

It seems that the “GMAT Focus” changes have not done much to slow the decline of this product.  There is a lesson here, perhaps, about how legacy test makers need to do more than shorten their tests and mess about with the item types if they want to win back the hearts and minds of test takers.  The kids might say that it comes down to vibes.  But there are more tangible things to keep in mind. They include cost, supplementary fees, the prep journey, customer-no-service, marketing… and more.

IDP and Pearson Compared

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

Between June 2021 and June 2022, IDP Education administered about 1,900,000 IELTS tests. During that same period, Pearson administered about 591,000 PTE tests.

Between June 2024 and June 2025 IDP administered about 1,293,800 IELTS tests (a 600k drop). During that same period, Pearson administered about 993,000 PTE tests (a 400k increase).

This according to the annual reports published by each firm.

Apples and oranges, I suppose. But one is left to wonder when the number of tests administered by Pearson will surpass the number administered by IDP education. One is also left wondering if Pearson (which seems to focus on a narrower range of markets) already does more tests in India than IDP.

(By my crude calculations, DET jumped from 494k to 684k in the same time frame)

Duolingo Room Scan: It’s Fine

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

I finally got around to experiencing the new room scan for the Duolingo English Test. The room scan is mostly painless. It resembles that of the British Council’s EnglishScore test: the test taker just has to slowly spin around their room while holding the secondary camera (their phone). There is also a second scan, which hasn’t been discussed much in this space. To complete it, the test taker first points the phone at their keyboard, and slowly moves it towards the space behind their computer. It is a little clunkier than the main room scan, and the test taker might attempt it a couple times before doing it properly.

Some have argued that requiring test takers to have a compatible smartphone is burdensome. This is true, to a certain extent. That said, many test takers will find that it alleviates the burden of completing room scans by carrying a laptop around their apartment. Remember that most test takers don’t have a cool-guy Macbook like the people who design and market tests. Instead, they have a barbell of a Windows machine with a bunch of peripherals connected via USB and a battery that has to be plugged in all the time because it maxes out at a 5% charge. Doing a room scan with such a machine really sucks. Ask me how I know.

Intelligibility and Comprehensibility Research from Aptis

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

New from Studies in Language Assessment is an article  by Daniel Isbell, Dustin Crowther, Jieun Kim and Yoonseo Kim which looks at the speaking tasks included in British Council’s Aptis Test. Specifically, it compares official Aptis scores to assessments of intelligibility and comprehensibility from laypeople recruited from the “Prolific” online research participant pool.  Scored responses from 50 test-takers were selected and those participants rated their comprehensibility on a 1-9 scale. For intelligibility, the participants were asked to transcribe the recordings.  Those transcriptions were compared to criterion transcripts created by the research team.  Among other things, the authors note that “to the ears of layperson listeners… speakers that earned higher Aptis scores were more intelligible and easier to understand.”

I would love to see more of this kind of research.  I suppose a similar study could be done of test-taker responses to just about any English test.

I Took the GateWay English Test

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

I took the Gateway English Test from English3 a few days ago.  I had a lot of fun with it. I’m not a psychometrician, so I can’t evaluate the validity of items, but I was happy to see that the English3 team put some thought into designing interesting tasks.  There are some negative points, but I’ll save those for the end of this post, lest anyone gets the wrong idea about me.

A few notes:

  1. This is a 90-minute test with a $99 price tag.  Proctoring is asynchronous, which I guess puts it in the “contemporary affordable” quadrant with DET and PEXT. Results come in five days or you can pay extra to get them more quickly.
  1. The test includes meaningfully integrated tasks!  They include listening to a lecture and answering a question about it orally, listening to a conversation and giving an opinion about it in writing, and listening to a “zoom” call and summarizing each of the speaker’s points in writing.  These are fun.
  1. Content is mostly “academic” with some “campus life” stuff.  I didn’t spot any non-campus “daily life” content. Reading and listening passages resemble what you might find on other tests.
  1. Since this is a 90-minute test, there is still time for a complete essay. Indeed, there is quite a lot of written and spoken production. The 90-minute length gives designers room to include quite a lot of speaking and writing, if that’s what they value. Going with a 90-minute length is a tough decision in a world where 60-minute tests seem to be the future… but that extra half hour does give designers a certain amount of freedom.
  1. The test uses the same on-screen note-taking widget as the ITEP.  I like that.
  1. The test starts with 5 unscored speaking questions.  Responses are shared with score users.
  1. The list of accepting schools seems to skew toward faith-based institutions, which is really interesting.  While taking the practice test I sort of sensed content that might appeal to the CLT folks, but didn’t pick up on any of that in the actual test.
  1. One almost senses that if the TOEFL team had a bit more time to think about their relaunch, they might have come up with a product sort of like this one. This is a fun, non-threatening test that includes an extended writing task, a ton of speaking, meaningfully integrated tasks and a splash of “campus life” stuff.

Meanwhile, some of the not-good stuff:

  1. Security seems dated.  This is an asynchronously proctored test that utilizes neither a secure browser nor a secondary camera.  I think institutions expect a bit more in 2025.
  1. Scoring is wonky.  The maximum score is supposed to be 600 points.  I scored 605 points.  My listening score was 680/600.  Whoops.
  1. Instead of linking my scores to the CEFR, my score report just contains the letters “CEFR.” Hmmm.

 

 

You Should Read More: Part 62

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

Not a ton to report this month, as much of my reading time was spent on fiction, which I don’t usually highlight here.  But I did check out a few relevant items.

First up, I read Norbert Elliot’s “On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America.”  This might be the best work on the topic,  but it is a pretty niche topic.  I learned a lot about why ETS raters grade TOEFL essays holistically – basically, it is pretty hard to get two raters to score an essay the same way when they are giving specific scores to various categories.  That actually answers some long-standing questions I’ve had about the IELTS test, actually.

Next, I read the April 4, 2024 issue of the London Review of Books.  I quite liked an article called “Zzzzzzz” about why we sleep. The topic of sleep has appeared on the TOEFL quite a few times.  I think I’ll even add a question about sleep to the book I’m working on right now.

Finally, I read the latest dispatch from the Luddite Club.  Now this is only available in print form and I don’t want to break that sacred trust by sharing the contents here, but if you happen to be a Luddite (or just enjoy traditional post), I do recommend joining their mailing list.

Also:  I have decided to supplement this column with something called “You Should Read More Ephemera,” which will encourage everyone to read more of the odds and ends that appear on the new TOEFL, starting in January.  I’ll do that by cutting out and photographing some of the various bits and bobs of English writing that cross my path.  First up is a little travel guide to the mountain I look at from my window every morning, which came from a copy of “Stars and Stripes Korea” which I picked up last time I visited Incheon Airport.  Enjoy: